Chapter Nine
Kai
The Arabidae was due to return for them at the break of dawn.
Alun and Os met Kai at the palace gates when the sun was little more than a flush of peach balanced on the glinting knife edge of the ocean. Bleary-eyed though he was, Kai was taken aback to find Eda hobbling along in their wake.
“Good morning, sweet,” she crooned, reaching up to pat and pinch his cheek. “Room for one more?”
Returning her embrace, Kai glared over her head at Alun and Oswalt, but each of them held up their hands in a silent statement of innocence.
Kai frowned. How in the world had she known then, where to find them and when?
He knew that to ask her was to receive a frustrating answer about age and intuition, perhaps balanced with a sly tap to the side of her nose.
Already too on edge for such theatrics, he cut in with his protests the moment she released him.
“Eda, I’m not certain this is a good idea,” he said. “There’ll be time yet to meet the other Merrow, but this particular trip might be—”
“Dangerous?” She croaked, rheumy eyes brightening. “Aye, so I’ve heard. They’ve been drowning the sailors, is that right?”
“Well—” He glanced at Al, who gave an odd sort of grimacing nod that said; May as well tell her if she knows so much. Kai sighed. “Yes. Yes, the Empress believes they’ve been drowning anyone who trespasses on what they consider their territory.”
Eda gave a low, thoughtful hum, thin lips pursed against a rueful smile.
“And what is it you think they’ll do to me, sweet?”
She pulsed her gills at him, but Kai refused to be charmed. She would not humour her way into this trip, not now that he understood what was at stake.
“That’s not the point, Eda. You may not be susceptible to drowning, but if they are capable of such atrocities, I have a duty to keep you out of harm’s way.”
“My duty predates yours, boy.”
Forcing back the groan that rattled at his clenched teeth, Kai set a gentle hand on her shoulder, and at the answering flash of determination in her stare, he steeled himself.
“Your duty has lapsed,” he told her. “The council is long retired, Eda. You’re an Elder no longer.”
Her gaze sharpened, lips thinning.
“I will always be your elder, Kai Cumhaill, and don’t you forget it.”
“Eda—”
But Kai was saved from further argument when Al cleared his throat; both Kai and Eda whipped around, their hands still clasped as tight as two wires, knotted and tugging one another to the point of snapping.
“She has a point, Kai.”
Eda crowed with delight, and Kai dropped her hand to pinch away the tension building behind his brow. It did not help. Beneath his own palm, he caught the pitying look Al threw his way before he went on.
“We already know that a ruling monarch isn’t typical for most Merrow clans,” he said, “and we have no idea what their customs are.”
Al shot an imploring look at Os, who gave one curt nod and added, “It may be that they still prescribe to a Council of Elders, as we once did. If that’s the case, having Eda present herself as your advisor would most certainly go over better.”
“Power in numbers,” the old woman chimed in brightly, mood suddenly much improved. “Sure, they can’t drown us all, can they?”
At that, Al chuckled and offered her his arm, then led the old woman through the gate to the awaiting carriage. Kai dropped his hand from his brow to watch them go, his mouth half-agape.
“Am I the bloody King, or not?” He asked of no one in particular, then called after them, “We’ve decided then, have we?”
“The more the Merrow-er,” Eda trilled.
Os stifled the briefest snort of laughter.
Merry as the others may have been, Kai could not help but withdraw on the short, downhill ride through the winding streets of the Imperial City.
It was not only Eda’s presence that unnerved him, although the unexpected concern for her safety certainly piled on to his heap of anxieties. But the whole truth—
The whole truth was that he could not help but suspect that every decision he made led to catastrophe.
He had taken up his father’s mantle, and it had led him to Avette.
He had trusted Avette to fight for him, for his people, and it had cost him his entire kingdom.
He had tried to recover his home, and it had lost him Adeline.
He had thought coming here was a compromise he could live with, but it had only led him to this moment—the moment that saw him boarding a ship to negotiate cohabitation with a clan of supposed murderers.
One bad decision after the other, the worst of them left to fester for close to six hundred years.
Somewhere in his blundering weaving of the fates entrusted to him, a thread had snagged—and now the entire ancient tapestry was unravelling in his hands, moth-eaten and disintegrating faster than he could mend it.
Kai was not cut out for this, and yet he had no choice.
He had to keep trying.
The Arabidae’s crew were near silent on the passage to Isa’s Graveyard.
A sombre air settled like a shroud over the great ship, and though the Merrow passengers could only guess at the dangers they faced beneath the waves, the oppressive gloom was quick to claim them too.
They spoke not a word to one another over the slow hours drifting beneath the crystal clear skies, the blue so bright and cheery it nearly seemed to mock them.
Kai swore he felt a strange weight to the salt air, felt it pressing at him harder and harder the farther they sailed from the shore until he thought his knees might buckle with the pressure.
It was out of necessity that he gripped the ship’s edge, needing that support beneath his own weight as he stared wordlessly out at the endless ocean.
Standing quietly at his sides, he suspected the others were doing the very same thing.
After a time, they approached a long line of wooden buoys that bobbed in eerie unison like ghostly sentries on the tide. Beyond the boundary they’d marked, the surface of the water was smooth; unnervingly so, as though not even the wind dared to pass into the Graveyard.
The ship gave an ominous groan beneath their feet, and Kai just about leapt from his own skin. He reached instinctively for Eda, and seeing her steadied, turned to the crew with his heart hammering somewhere around his gills.
“No farther,” the Captain said, his gruff hush carrying in the silence. He stared out at the glassy waters above the Graveyard, then tore his eyes away to fix Kai with a stiff nod. “We’ll await your return until dusk.”
And not a moment longer. The words not spoken rang clearer than those he’d said aloud.
“Thank you,” said Kai, in that same hush, before he turned to Os. “Wait until I break the surface before you help Eda down.”
Os nodded, and with little more to do, Kai kicked off his boots and socks, climbed atop the railing and stepped into the air.
The breeze tugged uselessly at him as he fell, one last weak attempt to stop him before the waters closed over his head.
And then Kai was submerged at long last, his own momentum dragging him down, down, down.
For the first time in nearly six hundred years, Kai swam.
It was agony.
His gills peeled apart, and immediately flinched shut at the burn of the salt dragging past his tender flesh.
He forced them open with a flex of his throat muscles, nearly gagging at the surge of searing water that sang through his throat and into his blood.
A familiar dry pulse followed, a wildfire catching through his veins as every fibre of his being called out for the Mother.
One screeching, keening plea for the mercy of Adhlas, for Her blessed waters and the magic he had lost. The tug of the tide hurt in a way that didn’t quite fit his earthly body —yet it was not entirely unwelcome.
The weightlessness. The rush of the water over his skin and the hush of the cool, dim world around him.
Even with all that empty space within—those caverns the magic should have rushed to fill—he felt the subtle changes in his body.
Felt the way his gills, with a painful stuttering start, finally bloomed open to accept the saltwater into his blood, his lungs stilling with one dull throb, his pores smoothing and extremities slightly stretching until he moved through the waves like a bird in the skies, and soared for the open air.
Kai broke the surface with a gasp, the pain waning somewhat as his gills sealed.
He was still blinking saltwater from his eyes when another body split the waves by his side, two more following in quick succession.
With one last glance at the sailors peering somberly over the ship’s edge, Kai turned and ducked beneath the water, this time bracing himself for the pain.
It hit him faster, yet in a weaker wave, washing over him and dissolving into the sea as he propelled his body into the depths.
He found Eda first, her white hair a beacon in the shadowy waters; it whipped and pulsed like ghostly seagrass as she turned her head to him, and even this far from the sun’s reach, he could see the tension etched in the deep lines of her brow.